Entry requirements

Months of entry

October, February

Course content

This project provides the opportunity for a student to become part of a vibrant, international team at The Open University working on the NOMAD spectrometer instrument on the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission, which successfully launched in March 2016.

The project has scope for flexibility and is intended to:

develop a radiative transfer model of the Martian atmosphere in preparation for ExoMars (in collaboration with Oxford University)

perform calibration and tests on Flight Spare instrumentation

prepare new techniques for retrieval of atmospheric species

exploit data returned from the NOMAD-UVIS instrument.

The project relates to the UVIS channel of the NOMAD instrument, an optical spectrometer led by The Open University to measure solar radiation travelling through the Martian atmosphere at UV and visible wavelengths, in order to detect and map the presence of ozone, dust and ice clouds in the atmosphere of Mars in unprecedented detail.

The student will work within a highly specialist spaceflight team and interact with European collaborators and the European Space Agency. The modelling studies undertaken may also be conducted in partnership with collaborators based in France and the US, presenting the opportunity also for preparatory data analysis from existing ESA and NASA Mars missions currently in operation.